User Reviews

Four or five uncles living together have only one real interest in life --- drinking beer, beer and more beer. Not the best environment for a young teenage boy, particularly since the family name bonds them all together, while also serving like a spiderweb to keep anyone from breaking away to better themselves.

There are virtually no meaningful interactions between men and women. RElationships impose on time critically needed for drinking beer. There are a few s....ing scenes, nothing like "having sex" or "making love" --- just short fast paced humping, of the let's-get-it-over-with variety. The men never rise to the level of sexual acts with women they necessarily like, so when the women get pregnant the men get annoyed.

One need not travel to Belgium to encounter this kind of dysfunctional living, as most of us found it in our own lives. The lucky ones, with ambition and tenacity, break away (as does the boy in this film) with the damned ones trying to drag us back, if we let them.

An interesting film, no doubt; but overpraised by other reviewers. Plan on a bath or shower when you get home. 6 of 10.

A struggling author, Gunther, is seen as the story begins. Like most writers, he is trying to put into a book his experiences. Gunther's childhood was a traumatic experience. Growing up in a small Belgian town, he was surrounded by male figures during his formative years. His mother was absent and had no input in his upbringing. So Gunther has to rely on his loutish father and uncles for role models, that in a way, marked his life forever. The only female during those formative years were his grandmother, Meetje, who had no vote in whatever was important for the boy, or his future.

Gunther was not a model student. Part of the problem was his inner conflict in which his family interfered in the way others saw him. Gunther is rejected by the only boy, Franky, that ever showed a semblance of being a true friend. Franky's father, decided his son didn't need a bad influence in his life, so the two became distant, as the worlds they both came from.

Being at the center of a hard drinking family also was a factor in Gunther's development. He saw his own father and uncles go to binges of drinking that rendered them useless. As Gunther gets older his relationship with a young woman is threatened when she becomes pregnant and he doesn't want her to have the baby. Gunther's, as a writer, experiences the rejection from publishers until a Dutch editor sees the merit of his life experiences in the novels he goes to write. The arrival of the baby soften Gunther's soul and then becomes the man he always wanted to be.

We were pleasantly surprised by what director Felix Van Groeningen was able to achieve with this film. He contributed to the screenplay in collaboration with Christophe Dirickx and Dimitri Verhulst. The Belgian cinema offers a different mixture of original ideas, that in the hands of the creator of this film, gives audiences a peek into a different way to present stories that capture the viewer's imagination.

Never saw Kenneth Vanbaeden, the young actor who plays Gunther as a young man. He reminds us of a young Ricky Schroeder when he was a child star in the American cinema. Mr. Vanbaeden is a natural; he gives an effortless performance as the child that grows without guidance and who owes everything he became to his grandmother's wishes to separate him from an alcoholic father and uncles that were leading him to a life of binging and perpetual drunkenness. Valentin Dhaenens is fine as the older Gunther. Koen De Graeve, an actor we admired in "Loft" plays Celle, the father that lives in a constant fog, neglecting his son. Gilda De Bal is effective as Meetje. The supporting cast is excellent.

Ruben Impens photographed the small Belgian town in all its drabness. The incidental music is by Jef Neve. We look forward to the next project of director Felix Van Groeningen, a talented voice from that part of the world with a lot to say.

I don't know what to think of this movie. It was one of the best movies I have ever seen, but also one of the most gross.

Many scenes are just gross (eg: when the neglected house cat eats the puke of father, when father is pissing in his pants while he is sitting on a chair during a beer drinking game, when some of the brothers shoot a pigeon when it shits on the bedsheets, ...) But it is also a sympathizing movie. Almost everything is filmed in the eyes of a 13 year boy who lives together with his beer drinking asocial, ill-mannered family. It are actually his father, some uncles and his grandmother. The grandmother is very tiny, has nothing to say and is not in position to change house rules nor the way of life. The boy is raised by those men and unaware of his marginal life. He just follows his uncles in their tracks (and begins to drink, smoke, ... and joins all those nasty events with his uncles).

The beauty of the movie is: you just get pity with the boy.

Years ago I went all the way to a small cinema at a fair distance from home just to see this movie and while I thought it was depressing I also thought it was fascinating. Today I rented it on a streaming service and enjoyed it even more than back then. If you can handle stuff such as nudity, explicit sex, vomit, urination, eating questionable food, and excessive drinking this movie shouldn't be too offensive or off putting. None of the those things is over the top but the depiction is brutally honest in its bleak realism. If you can't handle that, you might want to stay away from this movie. While depressing things such as one man drinking himself to death, another relapsing into alcoholism and another causing a traffic accident while drunk do happen, there are also positive things in the story. These are things such as one of the men's son being able to live a better life as an adult than his father or other family members despite the pretty awful conditions during his youth. One of the last scenes is of him teaching his young son to ride a bicycle without training wheels. It's one of those litlle things indicating his future is brighter than before. Apparently this movie is based on a book and at the very least has actual elements from the author's youth. I have never read it but it might be worth checking out. As a dutchman I had little trouble understanding the Flemish (there's a debate about whether it's an actual language or a dialect of dutch), but if you aren't dutch or have trouble with heavy regional accents you definitely will want to watch this with subtitles. Originally I gave this a 7 out 10, but I think 9 out 10 is fairer.

PS: Some of the things that happen are so outrageous they're bound to get a laugh despite the harsh subject matter.